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Information about Facial Expression

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Photographs from the 1862 book Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine by Guillaume Duchenne. Through electric stimulation, Duchenne determined which muscles were responsible for different facial expressions. Charles Darwin would later republish some of these photographs in his own work on the subject, which compared facial expressions in humans to those in animals.


A facial expression results from one or more motions or positions of the muscles of the face. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among Humans, but also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species.

Humans can adopt a facial expression as a voluntary action. However, because expressions are closely tied to emotion, they are more often involuntary. It can be nearly impossible to avoid expressions for certain emotions, even when it would be strongly desirable to do so; a person who is trying to avoid insult to an individual he or she finds highly unattractive might nevertheless show a brief expression of disgust before being able to reassume a neutral expression. The close link between emotion and expression can also work in the other direction; it has been observed that voluntarily assuming an expression can actually cause the associated emotion.

Some expressions can be accurately interpreted even between members of different species- anger and extreme contentment being the primary examples. Others, however, are difficult to interpret even in familiar individuals. For instance, disgust and fear can be tough to tell apart.

Because faces have only a limited range of movement, expressions rely upon fairly minuscule differences in the proportion and relative position of facial features, and reading them requires considerable sensitivity to same. Some faces are often falsely read as expressing some emotion, even when they are neutral, because their proportions naturally resemble those another face would temporarily assume when emoting.

Universality

Charles Darwin noted in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:

...the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.


Still, up to the mid-20th century most anthropologists believed that facial expressions were entirely learned and could therefore differ among cultures. Studies eventually supported Darwin's belief to a large degree, particularly for expressions of anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, happiness and caring.

The people of New Guinea called South Fore were chosen as subjects for one such survey. The study consisted of 189 adults and 130 children from among a very isolated population, as well as twenty three members of the culture who lived a less isolated lifestyle as a control group. Participants were told a story that described one particular emotion; they were then shown three pictures (two for children) of facial expressions and asked to match the picture which expressed the story's emotion.

While the isolated South Fore people could identify emotions with the same accuracy as the non-isolated control group, problems associated with the study include the fact that both fear and surprise were constantly misidentified. The study concluded that certain facial expressions correspond to particular emotions, regardless of cultural background, and regardless of whether or not the culture has been isolated or exposed to the mainstream.

Facial expressions

Some examples of feelings that can be expressed are:

The muscles of facial expression

See also: facial muscles.

See also

External links and references

MUSCLE (multiple sequence comparison by log-expectation) is public domain, multiple sequence alignment software for protein and nucleotide sequences.
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The face is the front part of the head, in humans from the forehead to chin including the hair, forehead, eyebrow, eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth, lips, philtrum, teeth, skin, and chin. The face is used for expression, appearance and identity amongst others.
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emotion is a "complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which the individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter of event.
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Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the process of transmitting messages without spoken words, sometimes called body language, messages can be communicated through facial expressions; gestures; gaze; and posture; Many include the space we use around us; object communication
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Mammalia
Linnaeus, 1758

Subclasses & Infraclasses
  • Subclass †Allotheria*
  • Subclass Prototheria
  • Subclass Theria

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species is one of the basic units of biological classification. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.
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A voluntary action is a motor response induced by a processed response to an external stimulus. It is opposed to a reflex action.
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Disgust is an emotion that is typically associated with things that are perceived as unclean, inedible, or infectious. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust refers to something revolting.
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Contentment refers to the neuro-physiological experience of satisfaction and being at ease in one's situation, bodymind (cf. John Money), body, and/or mind.

In Yoga (Yoga Sutras of Patanjali), movement or positions, breathing practices, and concentration, as well as the
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Disgust is an emotion that is typically associated with things that are perceived as unclean, inedible, or infectious. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust refers to something revolting.
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Fear is an emotional response to impending danger, that is tied to anxiety. Behavioral theorists, like Watson and Ekman, have both suggested that fear, along with a few other basic emotions (e.g., joy and anger), is a trait innate to most higher functioning organisms.
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Charles Robert Darwin

At the age of 51, Charles Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species.
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The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is a book by the British naturalist Charles Darwin published in 1872, on how animals and humans express and signal to others their emotions.
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Anthropology (from Greek: ἄνθρωπος, anthropos, "human being"; and λόγος, logos, "speech" lit. to talk about human beings) is the study of humanity.
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New Guinea<nowiki />

Political division of New Guinea

Geography
<nowiki/>
Location Island north of Australian continent
Coordinates
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A scientific control augments integrity in experiments by isolating variables as dictated by the scientific method in order to make a conclusion about such variables. In a controlled experiment, two virtually identical experiments are conducted.
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This article is about the cultural and social sciences term mainstream. For the Hugo-nominated fanzine, see Mainstream (fanzine). For the record label, see Mainstream Records.

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Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Examples include listening carefully to what someone is saying while ignoring other conversations in the room (the cocktail party effect) or listening to a
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Desire may refer to:

Feelings

  • Interpersonal attraction
  • Preference, on which microeconomic theory is based
  • Motivation, thought that leads to an action
  • Tanha in Buddhist psychology, as described in the Four Noble Truths

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Disgust is an emotion that is typically associated with things that are perceived as unclean, inedible, or infectious. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust refers to something revolting.
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Excitement could refer to:
  • the excitation of electrons
  • sexual arousal

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Fear is an emotional response to impending danger, that is tied to anxiety. Behavioral theorists, like Watson and Ekman, have both suggested that fear, along with a few other basic emotions (e.g., joy and anger), is a trait innate to most higher functioning organisms.
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42 (1), 43-55. doi: 10.1111/1468-5906.t01-1-00160
18. ^ Moreira-Almeida Alexander, Lotufo Neto Francisco, Koenig Harold G. "Religiousness and mental health: a review" . Rev. Bras. Psiquiatr. [serial on the Internet]. 2006 September, cited 2007 June 21, 2007 ; 28(3): 242-250.
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Severe mental confusion of a degree considered pathological usually refers to loss of orientation (ability to place oneself correctly in the world by time, location, and personal identity), and often memory (ability to correctly recall previous events or learn new material).
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Surprise is a brief emotional state that is the result of an unexpected event. It is one of the six basic emotions identified by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in their 1975 book, Unmasking the Face.
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